Not In Your Genes by Oliver James

Author:Oliver James
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448118274
Publisher: Ebury Publishing

Chapter 7

The Real Causes of Ability

Most parents are delighted if their child excels in some way but mistakenly suppose that excellence is innate. No one is born that way, not anyone. Ability, or the lack thereof, is the result of the combination of the early care we receive and our role in the family drama, themselves strongly affected by intergenerational transmission of traits. There is no inborn talent or stupidity, no hard-wired quick-wittedness, exceptional capacity for abstraction, inborn drive to succeed. The DNA of exceptional achievers has never been shown to differ from that of the average person in any significant respect.

Locating the issue in the genes and brain of the child displaces the focus away from the family that created it and the society which created that family. The fact that about one quarter of British children1 leave school without five grade A–Cs at GCSE has nothing to do with genes, and everything to do with the high proportion raised in low-income families. It is now clear that IQ scores are a proxy for privilege, not for inborn mental ability:2 on its fifth birthday, the average child from the top social class has received five and half times more positive (relative to negative) feedback from parents than a working-class child.3 Children in low-income families are read to less, taught less maths, and have much less pressure for academic success from their parents. This is before they go to the state schools, which have much lower expectations than the private ones where 7 per cent of children are educated. The vastly better educational performance4 of Scandinavian countries compared with Britain can be largely explained by their much lower numbers of low-income families – only 6 per cent in Denmark, for instance.5 The proportion of children in low income families6 when Margaret Thatcher was elected in 1979 was 19 per cent; it was 31 per cent from 1981 onwards during her reign. Alas, it has stayed thereabouts ever since.

There are no ‘gifted’ children. Just as there is an industry based around the premise that many children are born with genetically inherited mental disabilities, so it is with the gifted. The professionals mistakenly suppose there are cognitive capacities that are wholly detached from the personality and deeper motivation of the child. In fact, ability derives from more or less unconscious motives arising from our unique nurture.

Indeed, having an exceptional IQ is not a strong predictor of subsequent excellence. Many decades ago, the American psychologist Lewis Terman7 identified 1,500 ‘exceptionally superior’ IQ performers with a score of 150 or more (the general average is 100, so this is a huge score) and they have been followed up to the age of 80. There were no artistic geniuses or Nobel prize winners. While they achieved more than the average American, they did no more than the average for their social class. Most startlingly, the 5 per cent of Terman’s group who had IQs of over 180 barely achieved anything more in their careers than those with 150.

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